In other news, my last day of employment for the summer has been and gone. I’m sad to see the back of it, I really did enjoy every minute. Still, they’ve said that I can come back whenever I like so it’s all good. I bought Mirror’s Edge on Thursday – it’s great fun. It’s extremely fast-paced, it almost reminds me of the platformers of old that I used to love so much.

Story’s not that good, but I only paid £8 for it and it’s well worth that. It does get quite infuriating at times, but so does any game if it’s challenging at all. Unfortunately, this means I’ve still done nothing useful this weekend. I was going to go LARPing today, but my mum wanted me to help with preparing our garden for a vegetable patch, which was obviously thrilling. There’s always tomorrow, eh?

Currently listening to Go Your Own Way by Fleetwood Mac. Youtube it – it’s one of my new favourites.

~ Godders.

I have to admit that he was right, thus far. I’m listening to Rumours, an album by Fleetwood Mac. And it’s brilliant, to be frank. I’m really, really looking forward to the rest of the stuff he picked out if it’s all going to be of this calibre. My only complaint is that all of the songs have a fade-out at the end and as such the album feels a little disjointed.

In other news, it’s my last day at work tomorrow (will be today by the time I’ve finished typing out this post) and I can’t believe how quickly the past four weeks have flown past. It seems like no time until I’ll be back in the grind that is A-level education, although I’m looking forward to seeing everybody again.

Between now and then, I have some Computing coursework to do, some Maths (lots of Maths) that I want to learn and the bulk of my EPQ assignment to do. I still haven’t started that: Score one for procrastination. It really does bug me how much of my time gets wasted, but at least I have actually done something useful recently.

Tomorrow should bring ratings for a lot of my music, and hopefully also some progress on the Computing/Maths/EPQ front. Currently listening to The Chain – Fleetwood Mac. It’s a good song.

~ Godders.

On the plus, I’ve discovered Smashing Magazine and it’s a fantastic resource for anyone who wants to design or develop websites. I’m really enjoying messing with some of the new HTML5 and CSS3 features.

So yeah, I’ve been playing a hell of a lot of cricket this week. Essentially from when I get home until when it gets dark every day after work, it’s great. Except we keep losing all of the windies and we broke the ball that swings. Darn. Tennis balls are rubbish to bowl with >_>

My bowling has been good though, I’m in really decent form. And bowling fast really needs some level of fitness. At the moment, I struggle to bowl more than a spell of four or five overs at full pace. And the last couple of such a spell would be pretty inconsistent anyway.

I ordered a DVI-I Male to VGA Female adapter the other day, and it arrived while I was at work today – using two monitors is brilliant. I’ve been asked why, and having used two monitors previously it’s almost impossible to go back: You just don’t have enough space on one monitor!

I mean, look at it – If you’re coding, you can’t have your code up and your preview up at the same time (this applies to both programs and webpages) and if you need two bits of code open at the same time it’s just awkward. Then we can consider that I’m currently trying to learn XNA Game Studio stuff from tutorials, and now I can have the tutorial open and my code open at the same time and not have to alt-tab between them.

Anyway, I intend to go sort out my music (I’ve bought five albums recently that I’ve still not stored on my pc haha), I know this is quite a short entry but I’ve really not got a lot to say.

~ Godders

Having my own business is one hell of an attractive idea, and being able to earn money from using my personal programming and designing skills would be absolutely amazing. These two ideals, in my opinion, go hand-in-hand. I could draw you out an idea of what I want the website to look like, and even how I would begin to go about making the thing, just from my brain refusing to let me sleep last night.

But it begs a few questions:

1. Is it worth the time effort? Especially over the next year when I should be working hard to make sure I get my grades for University.

I think it is. It’s not like I do a whole lot of homework anyway – any work I do tend to be in topics where I don’t know things and hence for interest as much as for my teachers.


2. Would I actually have the capabilities to run a business? And isn’t it cheating calling a one-man-band a business?

Any business requires an idea, and I have that. Ok, ideas for what products I’d actually make aren’t quite specific, but it’d be making video games: In all probability, these would be flash-based games that earn revenue from advertising; cheap windows-based games that people would buy online (emphasis on cheap); or Xbox 360 games distributed on Xbox Live Arcade. The second question is beyond my scope to answer, but it would be adding a whole new level to anything I produce – would you rather buy a product from John Smith, or from his company that has a flashy website and no mention of the fact that it’s him on his own?

3. Would I make any money out of this at all, or would I be wasting my time?

Well, the advertising idea would certainly make money – no matter how little – and more importantly, any of these ideas would make money after the games cease being useful for me. Let me clarify: once they’re finished and I’ve learned any techniques that I’m going to from making them, they then start earning me money. The way I see it, that’s the perfect way to have it working until I finish University.

But yeah. All of this is summed up in an article I was just shown: Ramen Profitable, but I was thinking of it anyway. It’s certainly an idea, and I can just do what I normally do: Make programs and learn new techniques. The fact that I’d be earning money on the side is honestly just a bonus. It could well be a good experience for me, though I’d certainly not be starting until I’d produced a couple of games that I consider web-worthy, and messed about with a website until I had something that looks great.

But I’d be interested to know what you think: If you just read this, tell me. I don’t care if your comment says I must be off my face to think of this, or if you think I’m less skilful than a dead rat – I’m asking for you to think of the cons that I’ve mostly neglected to cover, and whether or not you think they outweigh the advantages.

~ Godders.

It was a bit of a shock when I then found out that it appears you can only make games using Visual C# (maybe you need plugins or something to use other languages, I don’t know) but I don’t really mind – I just ploughed on and figured I’ll learn C# as I go. Which turned out to be a good plan.

Because the tutorials on the XNA website are so slow it’s unreal. I don’t mean in terms of buffering, I mean they assume you’re completely incapable of navigating your own screen. They have to recap in painful detail exactly where a menu is (despite having a goddamned video. I have eyes, thank you very much. And they work too, funnily enough.) and all of the important parts of the last video. You know, that video that I just finished watching.

It’s fair enough aiming the tutorials at people with no C# experience, or even no programming experience. But we’re not retarded. Honestly. Plus, it’s all in American. They really kill our language. For example, what is #? It’s a hash, or a sharp symbol. Not a pound. That looks like £.

Anyway, that’ll do for an XNA-directed rant for the moment. In other news, I still have the same job as yesterday and the day before. This is promising, no? Today, I was updating the content of one website. And then tidying it all up with phpMyAdmin because the backend is useless and has no edit page. A minor annoyance, but it’s more than counterbalanced by the fact that Macs are pwettiful.

My job means that I’m not really getting all that much done: No Xbox 360, limited coding, no Mech, Stats or Pure Maths and no social contact. Fortunately, night was created for a reason: for people with jobs to not sleep because they’re doing things they would otherwise have done during the day.

Not to mention the fact that I’m enjoying both the work and the atmosphere. There’s a lot of banter that goes on, plus random pictures sent around on iChat (for example: this was pretty funny, if inappropriate) and I’m finding new places to eat in Huddersfield every day. We went to a noodle bar for lunch today.

None of us ate noodles. Anyways, back to the frustrating tutorials.

~ Godders.

So yeah, I started a job today. Full-time temporary, for four weeks. Making websites / updating websites / styling websites… you get the idea. It’s quite good, I like the environment muchly – mostly because everyone that I’m directly working with is really geeky. It’s fantastic.

While I’m on the topic of work: I’m using a Mac (The dual-core G5, a tad outdated but still nice) and the more I use OS X, the more I come to realise that I really, really want a Mac. I’m thinking either 18th birthday or leaving for University present, and probably a MacBook(or MacBook Pro). The only thing is, I detest the Mighty Mouse and their shitty small keyboard with half the useful buttons missing.

Also, while at work today, I’ve been listening to lots of Prog Metal and remembering just why I love Progressive Music. Opeth, Porcupine Tree and Ayreon were the bands I listened to today: Opeth’s soft album, Damnation, is absolutely brilliant – Windowpane is one of the best songs I’ve heard in ages. More of the same tomorrow, I reckon. Maybe some Dream Theater thrown in there too.

Had a fantastic sandwich for lunch, from a café called Breads (in Huddersfield) – Roast Vegetables and Feta Cheese, with Sweet Chilli Sauce. I’m not normally a fan of Feta, but the combination of the veg and the sweet chilli with the sour cheese was just fantastic. The pricetag, however, wasn’t quite so great – £4.73 for a sandwich and a bottle of coke is a bit excessive. Payday’s not going to be until next Wednesday either, so I think that’ll have to be my culinary indulgence for the week haha. Still, it was good.

Downloading Visual Studio is pissing me off – the download (which is 3.3GB) has died on me twice thus far, at 56% and 77% respectively. Am about to set it going again, cross your fingers for me! And I may or may not have played a little of a certain online game this evening. Still, I’m not playing it now so we can safely say that I’m not addicted again… yet.

Also, England won the second test of the Ashes thanks to some inspired bowling by one Freddie Flintoff. He can’t claim anything like all of the credit – it is, after all, a team game – but he certainly contributed his share to the victory. I played some cricket yesterday, too, but I don’t have that much time to play a lot of it.

That’ll do for the moment, and I doubt I’ll have anything interesting to say tomorrow unless someone spontaneously combusts at work or something.

~ Godders.